Ben Dorfman

Aalborg University, Language and international Studies, English, Faculty Member

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Working at Aalborg University in Denmark, I lead the undergraduate program in Languages and International Studies and write on issues from human rights and international affairs to historical memory, political philosophy, and culture wars issues. I have a passion for undergraduate education, putting students into contact with the worlds of diplomacy and international organizations, and writing which bridges the essay and the academic article.

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Papers by Ben Dorfman

<i>Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance</i> (review)

Human Rights Quarterly, 2013

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Book Review: LUCY BURKE, TONY CROWLEY AND ALAN GIRVIN, eds The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 2000, 511 pp. (index included), ISBN 0—415—18681—1

Cultural Dynamics, Jul 1, 2002

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Rights under Trial, Rights Reflections

An introduction to Historical Phenomenology

A Human Rights Life-World?: Politics, Society and Representation at the Start of the Twenty-First Century

Akademisk Kvarter, 2012

A Human Rights Life-World? Ben Dorfman 05 136 political utopia (Moyn 2010) and narrative structur... more A Human Rights Life-World? Ben Dorfman 05 136 political utopia (Moyn 2010) and narrative structures binding human origins with human ends (Dorfman 2012). The contemporary social subject is constantly confronted with images and ideas denoting rights. We are also confronted with the the articulation of rights on all levels of the social power scale-"hi" to "low." Given this, there is a need for an analysis of the rights "environment" at the start of the twenty-first century. I.e., how, precisely, are we confronted with rights ideas and images such that they appear "natural"-universal, "human" and ineluctably a part of the "age" (Bobbio 1996) in which we find ourselves? At least a partial answer to this might be the concept of a human rights "life-world." "Life-world" (Lebenswelt) is borrowed from phenomenological philosophy-specifically from Edmund Husserl (1983; 1970). The life-world involves everything "taken for granted" in human life (Husserl 1970, 123); the life-world encompasses sets of presumptions built-up over historical time. Life-worlds never appear as presumptions, or "life-world," however. This is an important point. Life-world appears as what is "simply there" (einfach da) (Husserl 1983, 51). Life-world appears as things registering as "literal" (wörtlich) as well as "figurative" (bildlich). I.e., representing concepts such as human rights, or providing senses that rights are simply "there," involves ensconcing social subjects in rights' literal and figurative representation. This is how rights confront us. In the twenty-first century, rights pertain to the "real." Rights pertain to the empirical. Rights pertain to "true" historical events-the terrain of the "literal." However, rights also pertain to entertainment, "virtuality," commercialism, advertisement and fantasy simulationmovies, video games and fashion. This will be posed as rights "figuration"-a semi-fictionalization, or "fantasticalization," of rights. Thinking about literality and figuration in a spectrum, what emerges is a liminal effect. Engaging social spaces of fact or fiction, entertainment or "serious" politics, rights "appear" for us. We can't "avoid" rights, as Kenneth Cmiel (2004, 117) argues. Popular and commercial cultures of rights confront us, as do serious political cultures of rights. In terms of two essential modes of representation-"literality" and "figuration"-rights become an ineludible concept within the confines of contemporary political society and ideas. In terms of a rights life-world, however, fact and fiction is not the end of the story. Rights representation demands reference to

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Review of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude

Mindspaces: A Commentary on Thinking Global Pasts and Futures after Beijing

Intellectuals and the People, by Angie Sandhu, Review

Writing History, Writing Resistance: History, Narrative and the Political

Examining January 6th: Rights, Human Rights, and the Human Rights "Age

International social science review, 2021

The European Mind

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri — Empire

Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate, 2003

Empire is an enormously attractive book if you are a postmodern communist (which I think I am, al... more Empire is an enormously attractive book if you are a postmodern communist (which I think I am, although I am not sure). In the text, capitalism is posed as an unqualified evil (satisfying the communist) and the decentered social order of the late 20th, early 21" century will be the source of its undoing (satisfying the postmodernist). Moreover, the revolution is a "will;" a postmodern-cornmunist undoing of capitalism must come. As Hardt and Negri pose it, the heterogeneity of Empire, based in globalization and postmodern communication, is shadowed by a homogeneous labouring class that has been expanded by Empire's dispersed nature. It (the labouring class) has been given the tools by Empireprecisely high tech communication and unprecedented internationalizationthrough which it will overthrow its elusive master (Empire itself). Empire thus allows the reader to maintain the universalist, utopic dreams of a communist while seeing the diversity of the postmodern world as important to the realization of that utopia. At the center of this promised postmodern communism is the concept of Empire itself, which is supposedly separate from empires (note the lowercase "e") as we traditionally conceive of them. The difference is that Empire involves the renunciation of empire. In the wake of two world wars and the dissolution of nineteenth and early twentieth century "new" empires, argue Hardt and Negri, discoursebe it official political, popular, or academichas been oriented away from the right to dominate other identities and thus encouraged the egalitarian multiplying of world identities. This has been facilitated by the unique monetary conditions of the postWar world. Since the Bretton Woods treaty, Hardt and Negri posit, the spread of American style capitalist practices has encouraged the play to and creation of differences among groups and individuals in order to diversify and expand capital markets. This has created the "cool" world of postmodernismliberal and multiculturalthat has been acknowledge by figures from Jameson to Lyotard to Baudrillard. Hardt and Negri emphasize its redeeming qualities. Empire has put liberation and free movement on the mind and into the practices and routines of many individuals around the world. It has also given them a degree of comfort to the idea of difference at the levels of culture and communicationcomfort that can only facilitate the fraternization and eventual solidarity of individuals and groups. Thus, Empire, insofar as it is equitable with capitalism (and specifically Americanism), is dubious. However, the new element of Empire, the renunciation of constraint, makes it strangely productive, worth embracing, and intriguing for leftists who also want to embrace the postmodern.

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Postmodernism, Knowledge and JF Lyotard

Impact, 2002

An Introduction to Historical Phenomenology: Prospectus

vbn.aau.dk

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Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance

Contemporary Theatre Review, 2012

in the book. Although the work of these various artists may share what could be called a postdram... more in the book. Although the work of these various artists may share what could be called a postdramatic ethos, they nonetheless are marked as much by their differences in approaches and aesthetics as they are by their similarities. As a way of capturing both, Harvie and Lavender close the book with a "contingent conclusion," something they call "not quite a manifesto," which encapsulates the guiding tenets of the processes examined in diagrammatic form (242-3). Any such synthesis of postdramatic theatre stands on shaky intellectual ground, but this canny anticonclusion is both a tease and a deft maneuver that nicely covers all their tracks.

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